I haven't kept up with Artemis development but I've read extensively about Challenger and Columbia. These two parts of the article stood out to me:
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
wolvoleo 7 minutes ago [-]
Yes and the reversal of safety calculations really surprised me. "The orbiter has a total fail rate of one in 1000 so this individual part is higher than 1 in 10000", something like that. Where neither premise was actually tested or verified. Just specified on paper as a requirement and then used for actual safety calculations.
I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.
eru 2 hours ago [-]
About the last point:
At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.
kitd 2 hours ago [-]
I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake. Maybe offer the first one on Artemis II, a deferred one for the current US administration?
bayindirh 52 minutes ago [-]
James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said "If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
shiroiuma 54 minutes ago [-]
>I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.
Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?
kakacik 58 minutes ago [-]
Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't share such optimism.
sheiyei 19 minutes ago [-]
The point with the last bit was that they should be put in an unsafe craft.
bayindirh 51 minutes ago [-]
You don't have to be an optimist. You have to try.
Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.
cultofmetatron 2 hours ago [-]
Hard disagree. some of our best technologies came about to solve problems related to space travel which we later found useful for mundane problems at home. gps, digital cameras immediately come to mind. The only other phenomena I can think of with similar effects on human progress is war... I'll take a space race thanks
eru 1 hours ago [-]
Have you heard of opportunity costs?
About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.
necovek 1 hours ago [-]
I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.
bayindirh 29 minutes ago [-]
I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.
eru 1 hours ago [-]
Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing your whole foot, yes.
fastball 36 minutes ago [-]
What opportunity is being lost out on because of space exploration?
DoctorOetker 2 hours ago [-]
could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?
gorgoiler 14 minutes ago [-]
Is there any research on the effect of apparent gravitational field strength on sports? I’d be willing to bet that rocketry and artillery takes account of 50mm/s2 difference at the equator. While the difference is obviously tiny, the margins in modern sports are also miniscule.
Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?
xp84 1 hours ago [-]
If the NFL were to somehow become involved, you can bet that they'd somehow manage to turn the financials around and get some of that sweet government money flowing in their direction, just like the dozens of taxpayer-funded or otherwise tax-advantaged stadium deals in the past 25 years that allow us to thank Big Football financially for gracing us with the presence of football teams.
It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.
eru 1 hours ago [-]
Which government? The moon doesn't belong to any one government.
Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from selling these pieces of paper?
trhway 1 hours ago [-]
just wait until influencers start flying there. Not on SLS of course. Flyby on Starship cattle class - say 100 people (500 for LEO and "SFO to Shanghai" while for Moon - several days would require better accommodations, thus 100) - at $5M/launch, 10 launches (9 of them - tankers) - thus $50M 3 day roundtrip for 100 people. Half a mil per person.
turtletontine 2 hours ago [-]
Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?
idlewords 2 hours ago [-]
The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences:
1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).
2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
> NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive
So cost cutting, as always.
lanternfish 2 hours ago [-]
Engineering is done in the context of constraints, cost is one constraint - and its a relatively conserved constraint. Saving labor in one area allows for more care in other areas. Especially given that labor is often not cost constrained, but skill constrained, which is less elastic.
idlewords 2 hours ago [-]
You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion program of cutting costs.
shiroiuma 51 minutes ago [-]
There's different kinds of costs: cost to the government, and cost to actually build the thing.
The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.
namibj 1 hours ago [-]
The fix for not doing that by hand is to get a robot to do it, given the applicator is human-held, a human-strength Kuka with enough reach to cover the area it can handle before the applicator needs refurbishment of some sort which would give a good opportunity to move the robot to a new section of the heat shield.
XorNot 18 minutes ago [-]
Labor intensive methods aren't automatically better: you have more manual steps which must be done perfectly and validated etc.
adgjlsfhk1 2 hours ago [-]
Apollo was ridiculously expensive. it was a proof of concept, but not sustainable for long term exploration
ponector 45 minutes ago [-]
How expensive in comparison to the nuclear submarines or nuclear carriers?
XorNot 17 minutes ago [-]
At its peak the Apollo program was about 6% of US GDP.
plaguuuuuu 13 minutes ago [-]
too labor intensive - each launch already costs like $1bn, how bad can it be
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
idlewords 2 hours ago [-]
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here.
The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.
That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.
arppacket 1 hours ago [-]
It looks like they did some worst case testing that was reassuring, so that it isn't Russian roulette? Any comments on that? I suppose their composite testing and temperature projections could also be wrong, and their trajectory changes might not be mitigating enough for the heat shield chunking, but that's a few different things all simultaneously being wrong for a catastrophic failure to occur.
The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
wolvoleo 5 minutes ago [-]
In the space shuttle disasters the hardware had at least been used more than once. A huge lot of this one is only tried and tested on paper.
And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing.
For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.
irjustin 2 hours ago [-]
> In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem.
Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.
That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.
I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
GMoromisato 2 hours ago [-]
There were a lot of mistakes with Challenger and Columbia--I totally agree. But I don't think it was money. It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches (unlike some CEOs, maybe).
I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
irjustin 46 minutes ago [-]
> It's not like the NASA administrator gets a bonus when a rocket launches
It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.
For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
cwillu 2 hours ago [-]
"It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" and "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly" are both compatible with the probability of a disaster on reentry being 10%.
AIorNot 2 minutes ago [-]
As a former NASA guy I would trust Eric Bergers measured and detailed reporting here over that blog post that says they are all going to die
As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:
“ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion”
Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context)
The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light
adgjlsfhk1 2 hours ago [-]
for human spaceflight we want a lot more than "likely" (>50%). The standard is usually "extremely likely" (~1/100 to 1/1000 chance of failure)
GMoromisato 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe. What was the probability of Loss of Crew during Apollo? There were 9 crewed missions and 1 almost killed its crew (I will omit Apollo 1 for now). I could argue that Apollo had a 1 in 20 chance of killing a crew. Indeed, that was one reason given for cancelling the program.
The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?
In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]
My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
irjustin 2 hours ago [-]
1/100 is absolutely terrible. Shuttle had 1.5% failure rate. Bonkers.
[edit]
For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
mpweiher 47 minutes ago [-]
It is easy to reconcile these two statements.
The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.
cubefox 24 minutes ago [-]
> It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Look up the term "expected value". If a pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.
"It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."
such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical.
Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.
Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.
waterTanuki 41 minutes ago [-]
> The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe.
This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?
The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.
bsilvereagle 4 hours ago [-]
> “Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022
The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.
sillysaurusx 3 hours ago [-]
How does SpaceX test it? Have they needed to solve this problem?
SyzygyRhythm 2 hours ago [-]
There were 19 successful unmanned Dragon 1 missions before Crew Dragon, and an unmanned Crew Dragon mission before the first crewed one (actually two missions, but one didn't reenter from orbit). The heat shield material and design was essentially the same and so there was a great deal of flight heritage.
recursivecaveat 2 hours ago [-]
In particular I don't think its physically possible to test Orion components in flight very many times. It relies on SLS which chews through 4 space-shuttle engines every time, which even with unlimited money I don't think you could acquire a large supply of very quickly.
hvb2 3 hours ago [-]
By having a much higher launch cadence and then analyzing the flight hardware afterwards.
Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
idlewords 3 hours ago [-]
They do iterative flight testing. Starship is I believe on its twelfth flight test; the first one was in 2023.
rkagerer 3 hours ago [-]
By blowing up unmanned spacecraft and letting the ones that survive catch fire?
margalabargala 3 hours ago [-]
SpaceX tests these in prod. Kinda like Artemis I did.
eru 2 hours ago [-]
And this is actually a decent strategy, but you can only really do this when you have lots of unmanned flights.
anitil 5 hours ago [-]
This is a concerning read, I'm not quite sure what the driving motivation is for Artemis, but the following answered at least part of my question -
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
ta8903 2 hours ago [-]
I understand why NASA might be a little antsy but 100B over 25 years doesn't seem like a lot for America for a long horizon project.
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but imagine how many brown kids could’ve those 100B kill? Or how many ICE agents could be hired?
sawjet 8 minutes ago [-]
Yikes.
delichon 4 hours ago [-]
I am very not brave but I'd volunteer. The trip is far more awesome than anything I have planned for the rest of my life. And if the shield fails on reentry it would only hurt for a few seconds. So if the crew and the backups and their backups read this and have second thoughts, ping me.
bertylicious 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure the other astronauts are really looking forward to fly with a person showing signs of suicidal ideation.
lostlogin 3 hours ago [-]
My theory is that this is something I’d say/do aged 20, and laugh at aged 60.
I’m slightly closer to 60 and am into the ‘No’ zone.
oulu2006 3 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting comment -- your life is precious brother, you might have something in store down the road :)
gedy 3 hours ago [-]
Depending on one's age, maybe not honestly? (Not the OP)
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
If they’re that age, they’re not qualified to be in the crew anyway.
qingcharles 1 hours ago [-]
John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the Space Shuttle...
bertylicious 2 hours ago [-]
In your opinion: at what age does someone become unworthy of life?
gedy 2 hours ago [-]
That’s definitely not my point, what I meant was it’s not unreasonable for someone who’s older - maybe children have grown, at our nearing retirement, etc. - why not take a risk to fly to space?
dundarious 3 hours ago [-]
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many young minds were twisted by old hypocrites.
stickynotememo 3 hours ago [-]
the old lie
lostlogin 3 hours ago [-]
The young die.
3 hours ago [-]
dataflow 4 hours ago [-]
> I am very not brave but I'd volunteer.
>> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board
healthworker 3 hours ago [-]
I think they were saying they would sign up just for the experience, even if it's unnecessary to the program.
dataflow 2 hours ago [-]
But that was exactly the point I was responding to, no? If NASA was fine with skipping the astronauts, then they would just send it unmanned, not find a random volunteer.
DoctorOetker 2 hours ago [-]
especially not one that may chicken out ( "very not brave" ) and destroy the cabin from the inside out by any means necessary (bashing at walls, pissing in cracks, etc.)
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
tuananh 53 minutes ago [-]
> Notice: Only variables should be passed by reference in /Users/maciej/Code/iw/site/month.php on line 8
if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.
voidUpdate 35 minutes ago [-]
I wonder what the heat shield engineers actually think of this. It's my understanding that in the Challenger disaster, the engineers were aware of the problem and tried to do something about it, but management weren't having it
orbital-decay 30 minutes ago [-]
> The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. [...] he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.
It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.
euroderf 20 minutes ago [-]
But this mission does not have O.J. Simpson. Does it ?
vsgherzi 3 hours ago [-]
Definitely concerned to hear but I’m hopeful that the core of nasa is intact. They’re some of the kindest and smartest people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. They don’t joke around with lives on the line. I hope the best for everyone involved. I’ll be watching the launch of Artemis 2 and 3 with excitement and hope.
nickvec 11 minutes ago [-]
NASA’s track record says otherwise, no? Challenger and Columbia come to mind.
CoastalCoder 4 hours ago [-]
The article seems compelling, but experience tells me to get both sides of a story before judging.
Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
cubefox 11 minutes ago [-]
Their testing procedures failed to predict the char loss before the flight, so they don't seem very reliable.
"countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."
aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago [-]
I’m fairly confident NASA doesn’t read Maciej’s blog. However I’m confident that many people there read the Google doc he linked to. I suggest you do too.
tennysont 2 hours ago [-]
While I appreciate independent bloggers, I think that the HackerNews community should expect big claims, like a NASA cover up:
> NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem.
to at least warrant a link.
kristianp 4 hours ago [-]
> The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
Looks like they did some reassuring testing for the worst case scenario:
The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
isoprophlex 3 hours ago [-]
Can't they do a few loops around the planet and skim only the upper atmosphere? always worked well for me on kerbal space program, haha
sephamorr 2 hours ago [-]
This is actually what is thought to partially have caused the damage seen previously. The new trajectory is supposed to just have a single heating pulse instead of two.
uoaei 3 hours ago [-]
Aerobraking causes heat cycles. Expanding and contracting a material that already has "not large, large chunks missing" doesn't seem very prudent. Even before the evidence of deterioration, I'm not sure the safety culture at NASA would reach for that any time soon when a single high-temp event would work.
dataflow 4 hours ago [-]
What I don't get is why the heck are the astronauts willing to risk their lives on something they must know by now is so dangerous? Is it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?
shawn_w 3 hours ago [-]
There aren't many people left who've been that close to the moon. Lots of people would love to be on that list.
3 hours ago [-]
spike021 2 hours ago [-]
To be honest I don't know how close to non-fiction "The Right Stuff" (book or film) was but if you watch it you'd maybe gain an understanding for why astronauts do these things. At least that part is believable.
renewiltord 3 hours ago [-]
This degree of lifespan-maximization is something you might have but others don’t necessarily share. E.g. old people went to Fukushima to sort it out. “Was it really better to risk death than to risk getting fired?”
Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
> Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
I want you to repeat those words as you melt away re-entering the atmosphere.
FpUser 3 hours ago [-]
Some people go to war for the thrill of it, others do base jumping, free solo climbing and whole lot of other activities that eventually kill many of them. It is in their genes.
EA-3167 4 hours ago [-]
The author seems to have a pretty extensive history of… strong disdain for Artemis II. While has mentioned concerns about the heat shield before it was in the context of a laundry list of complaints, and it was nowhere close to the top.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
kristianp 2 hours ago [-]
If I recall correctly the Author worked at NASA.
thomassmith65 3 hours ago [-]
This comment in dripping with elitism. We trusted the rocket scientists and what did that get us? The Challenger disaster. /s
throw-23 3 hours ago [-]
As someone who is actually (still) a fan of basic research, Artemis looks like a fun time for the 1% with a $100 billion dollar price tag, except that since it's only 4 astronauts and support staff, it's less than 1%. I opposed messing with NASA funding for a long time, but arguments referencing spin-off tech and so on wear thin. Spin-off occurring lately would/could only be captured by existing billionaires anyway, and without much benefit for society in general.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
cromwellian 1 hours ago [-]
NASA's budget is 0.35% of the Federal Budget. The US Government spends the equivalent of 20 years of moon mission spending on ICE. They're spending 2x that on Iran war. They blew $200 billion in PPP Loan fraud in 2020 alone.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
kakacik 37 minutes ago [-]
> it provides a beacon for humanity to dream
Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't care much TBH).
If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but given enough time one of many ways that would happen will happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down here, manmade or not.
Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget. The charismatic new Administrator has staked his reputation on increasing launch cadence, and set an explicit goal of landing astronauts on the Moon before President Trump’s term expires in January of 2029.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
themafia 4 hours ago [-]
> if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it.
Your link says it failed in testing, not in flight.
themafia 3 hours ago [-]
Did they demand an unmanned flight just to prove it worked? Or did they accept an entirely new design based on modeling and ground tests and then immediately flew it with crew on board?
Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.
happyopossum 3 hours ago [-]
None of what you’re saying happened.
They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.
There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
> SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission (Crew-5) will fly with a different, updated heat shield structure after a new composite substrate failed acceptance testing
I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.
2 hours ago [-]
johng 5 hours ago [-]
Great read and interesting article. Hard to believe that NASA would risk astronauts lives simply to save face, but that appears to be what's going to happen.
cr125rider 4 hours ago [-]
But that’s exactly what happened with Challenger
jaggederest 4 hours ago [-]
And Columbia, too, when they made the decision to reenter without inspection, and reenter instead of waiting for rescue.
fishgoesblub 4 hours ago [-]
A rescue was impractical and potentially riskier no?
paleotrope 3 hours ago [-]
Riskier? Didn't they all die. Maybe if you ended up with 2 stranded shuttle crews, but correct me if I'm wrong, and I probably am, but couldn't the shuttle fly without any crew?
idlewords 3 hours ago [-]
It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
renewiltord 3 hours ago [-]
You can do a less risky thing and die or do a more risky thing and live. What happened doesn’t determine which thing is riskier just like I can call a 1 and roll dice and land it and you can call tails and flip a coin and not get it.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
steve-atx-7600 4 hours ago [-]
Astronauts are smart folks. They can vote with their feet.
bch 4 hours ago [-]
What a horrible (preventable) position to be in, though.
3 hours ago [-]
jojobas 4 hours ago [-]
Was there ever a risk-free spaceflight? Pretty sure even with this finding this flight would be safer than any Apollo.
saghm 4 hours ago [-]
You seem to be ignoring the "just to save face" part. I'd argue it would be a worse thing for our bar for how safe it should be to be raised significantly from when we had been in space as a species less than a decade to now that it's been 65 years.
tonymet 4 hours ago [-]
Never risk free , but Soyuz hardly lost any crew over its 50+ years
IndrekR 1 hours ago [-]
2/156 lost for Soyuz in 59 years, 2/135 for Space Shuttle in 30 years. Same rate. People often underestimate how intense STS actually was.
tonymet 52 minutes ago [-]
The 2 were early, and fewer lives were lost. The shuttle was unnecessarily risky , and NASA was aware from its inception
wiseowise 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and where is it now?
idlewords 2 hours ago [-]
The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.
everyone 4 hours ago [-]
Saturn 5 had a flawless record. The leftover space shuttle parts which SLS is cobbled together from, not so much. SRBs are inherently dangerous, theyre designed to quickly launch nukes from silos, not people. And Orion is just a typical modern Boeing project. So far its fallen at every hurdle right?
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
Saturn 5 came close to catastrophic failure at least once. It had partial failures. Its sort of perfect record is mostly down to luck and not launching very many times.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
evan_a_a 4 hours ago [-]
Orion is a Lockheed (CM) and Airbus (ESM) project.
everyone 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I thought it was Starliner on top. I dont know anything about Orion then.
SLS is very crappy and disappointing, its using shitty old space shuttle tech, + its ridiculously expensive in terms of payload to orbit, but it will probably work.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
tonymet 4 hours ago [-]
They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program , or did you forget ? Also a number during Gemini, Mercury and Appollo. Terrible safety record , and 5x worse than Soyuz . Shuttle fatality rate was 1/10. Approaching Russian roulette odds
staplung 3 hours ago [-]
In total, a little over one dozen astronauts died on shuttle flights (14). No astronauts died during Gemini or Mercury. Three died in a test on Apollo 1. The shuttle failure rate was nowhere close to 1/10. In fact, it was 1/67 (2 failures out of 134 flights).
1shooner 4 hours ago [-]
>They’ve killed dozens during the shuttle program
Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?
tonymet 59 minutes ago [-]
Oh 14 totally acceptable
mikelitoris 4 hours ago [-]
It’s the American roulette
shrubble 4 hours ago [-]
*Freedom Roulette
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
135 missions, 2 fatal accidents, that’s not 1/10.
tonymet 59 minutes ago [-]
It is if you’re dead
aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago [-]
I’d love to see a new law requiring the NASA Administrator (a political appointee) to be a member of the first crewed flight of a new program.
Rendered at 07:47:09 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> Moon-to-Mars Deputy Administrator Amit Kshatriya said: “it was very small localized areas. Interestingly, it would be much easier for us to analyze if we had larger chunks and it was more defined”. A Lockheed Martin representative on the same call added that "there was a healthy margin remaining of that virgin Avcoat. So it wasn’t like there were large, large chunks.”
Followed by:
> The Avcoat material is not designed to come out in chunks. It is supposed to char and flake off smoothly, maintaining the overall contours of the heat shield.
This is echoes both Shuttle incidents. Challenger: no gasses were supposed to make it past the o-rings no matter what, but when it became clear that gasses were escaping and the o-rings were being damaged, there was a push to suggest that it's an acceptable level.
There was a similar situation with heat shield damage and Columbia.
In both cases some models were used to justify the decision, with wild extrapolations and fundamentally, a design that wasn't expected to fail in that mode /at all/.
I know the points that astronauts make about the importance of manned space exploration, but I agree with this author that it seems to make sense to run this as an unmanned mission, and probably test the new heat shield which will replace the Artemis II design in an unmanned re-entry as well.
I don't know how a big organisation can think like that. But I guess these calculations were ones out of millions of ones made for the project.
At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.
I can't agree more.
Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-COlil4tos
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsZaDbxCgM
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.
Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?
Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.
About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.
Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?
It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.
Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from selling these pieces of paper?
1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).
2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.
So cost cutting, as always.
The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around.
And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to reconcile "It is likely that Artemis II will land safely" with "Artemis II is Not Safe to Fly", unless maybe getting clicks is involved.
Regardless, this is not a Challenger or Columbia situation. In both Challenger and Columbia, nobody bothered to analyze the problem because they didn't think there was a problem. That's the difference, in my opinion. NASA is taking this seriously and has analyzed the problem deeply.
They are not YOLO'ing this mission, and it's somewhat insulting that people think they are.
The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.
That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.
The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.
What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.
And the idea that 'if we throw this much money at it, it really must be fine' I don't buy either. Look at how that worked out for Boeing.
For all my feelings about Musk I would much rather step into a rocket that has exploded in all kinds of imaginable situations before so they know how the materials and design actually behave in real world scenarios. I do really think that is the way to go.
Being pedantic, NASA management "ignored" engineers - because money.
That said, I 100% agree with you assuming:
> “We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.
I only say assuming not that I don't believe Isaacman, but historically NASA managers have said publicly everything's fine when it wasn't and tried to throw the blame onto engineers.
With Challenger, engineers said no-go.
With Columbia, engineers had to explicitly state/sign "this is unsafe", which pushes the incentivisation the wrong direction.
So, I want to believe him, but historically it hasn't been so great to do so.
I think the problem with both Challenger and Columbia was that there were so many possible problems (turbine blade cracks, tiles falling off, etc.) that managers and even engineers got used to off-nominal conditions. This is the "normalization of deviance" that Diane Vaughan talked about.
Is that what's going on with the Orion heat shield? I don't think so. I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
It's related to funding. I mean it's always money, right?
But in Challenger's case, there was very heavy pressure to launch because of delays and the rising costs. I remember in a documentary they explicitly mentioned there was a backlog of missions and STS-51 had been delayed multiple times. To rollout/fuel, costs a LOT and challenger had been out on the pad for a while. Rollback was a material risk+cost.
For columbia, yea less about money. They ignored the requests to repoint spy sats and normalized foam strikes.
> I think NASA engineers are well aware of the risks and have done the math to convince themselves that this is safe.
And that's the way it should be. Everything has a risk value regardless if we calculate it or not. It's never 0... (maybe accidentally going faster than light is though?) We just need to agree what it is and is acceptable.
Story time - I was a young engineer at National Instruments and I remember sitting in on a meeting where they were discussing sig figs for their new high precision DMMs. Can we guarantee 6... 7 digits? 7? and they argued that back and forth. No decisions but it really stuck with me. When you're doing bleeding edge work the lines tend to get blurry.
As he shows that Olivas changed his mind:
“ Olivas told me he had changed his mind, expressing appreciation and admiration for the in-depth engineering work done by the NASA team. He would now fly on Orion”
Anyway we live in an age of armchair experts in youtube (who are often very smart but quick to rush to judgment without enough context)
The article explains the situation in a more balanced and fair light
The first Shuttle launch probably had a 1 in 4 chance of killing its crew. It was the first launch of an extremely complicated system and they sent it with a crew of two. Can you imagine NASA doing that today?
In a news conference last week, a NASA program manager estimated the Loss of Mission chance for Artemis II at between 1 in 2 and 1 in 50. They said, historically, a new rocket has a 1 in 2 chance of failure, but they learned much from Artemis I, so it's probably better than that. [Of course, that's Loss of Mission instead of Loss of Crew.]
My guess is NASA and the astronauts are comfortable with a 1 in 100 chance of Loss of Crew.
[edit]
For comparison, commercial aviation has something like 1 in 5.8m or 6x 9's of reliability.
The "likely" in "likely ...to land safely" and "likely to work fine" is not nearly good enough.
Look up the term "expected value". If a pressing a button has a 10% chance of destroying Earth, it is both 1) likely that pressing it will do nothing AND 2) the case that pressing it is extremely unsafe.
it doesn't matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II
"It will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972."
such "second/first" were ok 60 years ago. Today the only reason for that is that the SLS isn't reusable while the cost is hyper-astronomical.
Today's tech complexity, engineering culture and overall managerial processes don't allow the first/second to succeed as a rule. Even the best - Space X - has got several failed launches back then for Falcon and now for Starship.
Of course we wish success, and it will probably succeed - just like the Russian roulette so aptly mentioned in the sibling comment.
This take completely ignores Camarda's observations that there is a culture of fear spreading at NASA which punishes whistleblowers. I'm not saying he's 100% correct, but how can you claim such a take is truly balanced if there's a possibility one of the parties is engaging in a cover-up?
The engineers at NASA & astronauts aboard Columbia & Challenger also believed the programs were safe.
This is a strange claim, considering NASA used to have 2 facilities that were capable of this - one at Johnson and one at Ames. They were consolidated (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160001258/downloads/20...) but it seems like the Arc Jet Complex at Ames is still operational https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/
Also, they don't have anything human rated going beyond LEO. Coming back from the moon means you're going significantly faster and thus need a better heat shield
> That context is a moon program that has spent close to $100 billion and 25 years with nothing to show for itself, at an agency that has just experienced mass firings and been through a near-death experience with its science budget
>> Artemis II could fly just as easily without astronauts on board
I didn’t even have a strong interest in space before the dude started writing about it. Maciej could write about literal rocks and make it worthwhile to read.
if author is reading this, you should fix this maybe.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ddi792xdfNXcBwF8qpDUxmZz...
It reminds me of both the movies Capricorn 1 and Iron Sky ... and not in any good way.
Anyone know if there's a detailed response from NASA to the article?
The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.
"countdown clock started ticking down" "to a targeted launch time of 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, April 1."
> NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem.
to at least warrant a link.
Fun wording. This isn't news, concerns have been raised about Artemis II saftey in the past 3+ years since Artemis I and before then as well.
Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori...
Neither of these are major risks compared to never being what you want to be.
I want you to repeat those words as you melt away re-entering the atmosphere.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but then neither is the author.
Humans in space are currently still a waste of time/money, largely just a big surrender to PR, space-selfies, the attention economy, and the general emphasis on "seem not be" you see elsewhere. Please just send robots, build a base, and let us know when we can put more than ~10 freaking people up there at one time. If that fails, then at least we'll have results in robotics research that can be applicable elsewhere on Earth right now as well as help us achieve the more grand ambitions later.
House is on fire, has been for a while, fuck business as usual. I honestly think all those smart people ought to be charged with things like using their operations research to improve government generally, or with larger-scale high tech job programs. If you don't want to let NASA big-brains try to fix healthcare, we could at least let them fix the DMV. Hell, let them keep their spin-offs too, so they actually want success, and have some part of their budget that won't disappear. Basic research and fundamental science is (still) something we need, but we need to be far more strategic about it.
Food for thought: The way things are going, we can definitely look forward to a NASA that's completely transformed into an informal, but publicly funded, research/telemetry arm for billionaire asteroid-mining operations, and thus more of the "public risk, private-profits" thing while we pad margins for people who are doing fine without the help. OTOH, if NASA is running asteroid mining businesses at huge profits, then they can do whatever they want with squishy volunteers as a sideshow, and maybe we'll have enough cash left over to fund basic income.
I'm tired of nickle and diming science funding. You had scientists like Sabine Hossenfelder cheerleading NSF cuts cause of "waste" on string theory and particle accelerators. NSF is 0.1% of the federal budget, and it has funded a remarkable number of world changing inventions over the last 40 years.
We don't spent JACK on space. Look at the huge returns from the Hubble and James Webb. Why aren't we building HUGE HUGE space telescopes as immediate followups? We should have 50 James Webb equivalents. NASA once had plans for a "Terrestial Planet Mapper", a bunch of giant space telescopes flying in formation that combine their signals for truly incredible resolution, good enough to image planets around distant solar systems to a few pixels.
We've now seen plenty of planets in the habitable zone with nearby signatures of biological precursor molecules. We've found asteroids with sugars and amino acids in them. Give NASA 10x the budget and end these damn wars. The Pentagon failed 7 audits and can't account for $2 TRILLION and we're talking about humans in space a waste? It's a drop in the bucket, and it provides a beacon for humanity to dream.
The Apollo projects created a whole generation of people who wanted to go into STEM, that's the biggest ROI.
NASA, the NSF, the NIH, et al, are not the problem. Their spending is insignificant, NASA+NSF is < 1% of the budget.
Not only that, for truly long term perspective its about mankind survival. Even that POS musk realizes that (at least he did, not sure where his psychosis got him now and don't care much TBH).
If we stay around just Earth, we will be eventually wiped out. Maybe not in next million years (or maybe yes), but but given enough time one of many ways that would happen will happen, from the sky or from processes happening purely down here, manmade or not.
Its not rocket science, its not some magical theoretical what-if, just hard facts when digging around a bit and looking at history. Anybody who has power to change things and decides not to should be treated accordingly.
This is the most frustrating part. The Pentagon can fail the same audit multiple times and be missing trillions of taxpayer dollars but NASA has to move heaven and earth to show their relatively paltry $100B budget isn't going to waste. I'm tired of the double standards.
Are you sure about that?
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/24/spacex-swapping-heat-s...
Then again I'm not one of those people who roots for NASA to fail for some reason.
They had a heat shield on the capsule that failed testing, so they swapped out the interchangeable heat shield for one that passed testing.
There was no entirely new design, there was no new material science, it was the same heat shield that the previous crewed capsules have used without the manufacturing defect.
I don't know what "new" or "different" or "updated" or "structure" mean then anymore.
There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.
The outcome doesn’t determine the risk. I agree that this kind of office politics / face savings definitely is the cause of these two things.
Of course, six decades later, we should be able to do a lot better.
I didnt know, cus I just dont give a shit about this stupid project.
Columbia and Challenger crew totaled 14, who else are you referring to?